Click on the play button to listen to report.

Winter steelhead are the badder, meaner, more intense cousins of their summertime brethren. They come in in the coastal rivers sexually mature so they are looking to boogie and they don’t over winter a long period of time. Some are repeat spawners so they have done this a couple of times. You are getting down into the water column with bigger sink tips, the flies are presented closer to the bottom, often times are half a chicken as we jokingly say but it presents more of a profile and an irritant for the steelhead to come and grab hold of. Flies are definitely bigger. The word that gets tossed around is the word intruder style which are a bigger form and profile. The lingo is a letter called T and then they have a number attached and that is the sink rate of the tungsten attached to the sink tip that goes on the end of your fly line. Often you are fishing 10 to 12 feet of what is called T 14, some places get up to T 18, the flies are presented closer to the bottom. Often times are half a chicken as we jokingly say. The flies are bigger but at the same time you have to pay attention to water temperature conditions because as temperature increases as it gets a little further along in the winter and or spring, you don’t have to go down as far.